WEB 3.0 also known as WEB 3 is a new technology, taking over the tech adventure capital world, and if you are wondering what it is, you are not alone. Web 3.0 is seen as the third generation of the internet, a decentralized online ecosystem based on the block-chain . According to Christopher Mims, a WSJ Tech reporter, he said Web 3 is a new philosophy about how to realize technology in more distributed democratic way. Some tech experts are unconfused that web 3 could scale globally, experts like Elon musk, tagged it to seem more of marketing buzzword . As experts debate whether or not this new version of the web can become a reality. Here are some of the underline principle behind the vision for Web 3.0.
To better understand Web3.0 and what it’s setting apart from the web we use today, you have to go back to the early days of the internet where experts refer to as Web 1.0, most of the participants are content consumers, leading to navigating to individual standard web pages, web 1.0 for those who remember was just raw HTML, and lots of a simple web pages and it wasn’t not really controlled by anybody. This was a more decentralized version of the web, meaning anybody who knew how to code can build on it from their own computers, but at this time only small number of users have a technical skills to create and to publish contents. Then came Web 2.0 which is the stage of the internet we are living through now, web technologies like JavaScript, and HTML 5 makes the internet more interactive allowing start-ups to build platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, YouTube and many others. For the first time anyone can publish contents online even if they could not code. Web 2.0 is this mattering decentralized version of the web, world share things on social media which are run by two or three companies and while using Google search . This companies hold and manage the data collected from the users and they frequently track and save this data and use it for turning it into ads. Olga Mack, a block chain lecturer, and optimistic about Web 3 potential to reshape the internet.
This is where the vision of Web 3 comes in, The term Web 3 was first coined by one the creators of the ethereum block chain, Galvin wood in a 2014 blog post, he envisioned Web 3 as an open and decentralized version of the internet , theoretically users will be able to change money and information on the web without the need for a middle-man like a bank or a tech company. In this vision for web 3 world, people will have more control of their data and to sell it if they choose. And it will be all be operated on a decentralized distributed logic technology, the most common version of this is the block chain, which are still considered relatively new and improving, it could offer more transparency and autonomy for users. The computers that’s actually doing the computing for the storage of data anyone can own them and anyone can be part of the block chain and so that it’s not Facebook and Google’s computers doing that. With a single personalized account users will theoretically will able to move seriously from social media to email and shopping public record on the block chain of all those activity.
But how exactly will Web 3 remain operational, if it’s not controlled by a central corporation or entity. Theoretically people will be given virtual tokens or crypto currencies to incentivize them to participate in the operation of Web 3. A central element of this system is so called DEFI for Decentralized Finance and the idea is that if you can issue a token for everything in the universe, so you can financialise every possible interaction of computers, software and humans then you can create a vast ecosystem of crypto currencies which can be traded and valued relatively to one another.
Not clear how this decentralized token system will be regulated, how it can operate on large scale or even how well it will distribute control of the internet. Critics of the idea like how Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder coined Web 3 to be “a centralized entity with a different label”. Developers who really dug into this think that the underlined structures of Web 3.0 is very insecure, not decentralized as promised and as centralized as the former technologies.
Some see Web 3.0 as a critical building block in creating the Metaverse, the massive online world where people can use avatars to socialize, shop, work and play. But others say Web 3 and the Metaverse are two very different concepts. Because, the metaverse is being hyped a lot right now as much as Web 3 is, there are also companies that are doing the section of the two like how to create a metaverse that is somehow connected to the block chain . Right now, Web 3 is still very much an abstract concept with little real world foundation.
